In many circumstances, a person may desire to open a bottle that is sealed with a liner such as a foil liner without the person's hands coming in contact with the liner or the material inside. For instance in the medical field, it may be necessary to open a bottle containing a sterile fluid that is sealed with a foil liner without compromising the sterility of the fluid. If the bottle is to be opened in an operating room environment and the person opening the bottle is wearing gloves, it may be very difficult to open the foil-sealed bottle.
In some instances, it may also be very important that the foil liner not contact or break off and fall into the contents of the bottle after it has been punctured. In other instances, it may be very important to be able to push the portion of the foil liner after it has been punctured away from the opening to create an adequately-sized pour orifice.
Similar needs exist in many other types of applications outside the medical field. For instance, in the automotive field, a foil-sealed bottle may contain very caustic solutions which could be very harmful if they came in contact with the skin of a person opening the bottle. Accordingly, it may be important to be able to provide a convenient and simple way of opening such a bottle. It may also be very important to be able to reseal the bottle if it is not completely emptied after use. Therefore, a need exists to provide a simple means of opening a foil-sealed bottle and of re-sealing the bottle after use. One can easily imagine many such other applications in which foil-sealed bottles may need to be opened and subsequently re-sealed.
Various devices which have been used in the past to open such bottles include caps which contain a puncturing device located in the center of the cap. The cap may be screwed onto a bottle to force the puncturing device into the center of a foil liner. Such a puncturing device can create a single hole approximately the same size as the circumference of the puncturing device. If the puncturing device is small, it may be difficult to dispense the contents from the bottle. If the puncturing device is large, the act of puncturing the liner may cause pieces of the liner to break off and drop into the bottle or drop into the fluid as it is being poured out of the bottle. Numerous other types of devices such as "can opener" type devices and "spikes" have been also used in the past to open foil-sealed bottles.
One of the problems with many of the devices used in the past was that there was no foolproof method of making sure that the opening created in the foil was sufficiently large enough to meet the needs of the user without also possibly allowing portions of the foil to break off or fall into the bottle as it was opened. Another problem with some systems used in the past was that such systems required additional apparatus, such as a can opener, to open the bottle. Yet another problem with some bottle opening systems was that there was no method for maintaining the sterility of the contents of the bottle as it was opened. These and other problems are all addressed by the invention described below.